Daisy Jones & The Six

It's a musical drama about the slightly-damaged individuals in this fictional rock band and it does tackle themes like addiction, harassment, and discrimination — but all with a very light touch.

Although the series gains more heft after Billy gets out of rehab, and more torque once Daisy arrives, Daisy Jones & the Six never properly comes to life. It’s all a little too slick and sanitary.

Solid, if slightly underwhelming – but Riley Keough’s star quality leaps off the screen, and there is many a magical musical moment.

While Daisy Jones & The Six successfully brings the book’s characters and music to life, pacing-wise, it suffers from a similar problem as Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy.

Rather than expanding this universe, the detours into Simone’s storyline do more to spotlight its limits. It becomes easier to imagine the more sweeping saga this could have been.

Though the Amazon version of Daisy Jones is very watchable, it also never finds its own equivalent secret ingredient to push it over the top.

Although the era is reconstructed with lavish attention to detail, there’s no shunning the impression that these are beautiful actors cosplaying Seventies-style hedonism. ... Yet at its best Daisy Jones & The Six portrays the spine-tingling Dionysian thrill of musical collaboration.

Daisy’s personality is huge, but it’s not just the band over which she’s running roughshod — it’s the show. As a delivery system for two compelling performances, “Daisy Jones & the Six” is well worth watching. But I craved more moments in which it might really sing.

With a better script, a looser concept and fewer episodes, Daisy Jones and The Six could have been something really special. In its worst moments, however, it’s a banal, thin love story without enough grit or cool laissez-faire to emulate what makes seventies rock bands so fascinating. Unlike many rockstars of the era, I’m glad there won’t be a reunion tour.

The whole thing lacks a certain crackle, its sepia palette begging for literal and figurative color.

In this fictionalized spin on Fleetwood Mac, Riley Keough (grandkid of King Elvis) does herself proud, rocking out like Stevie Nicks on the sexy, druggy ‘70s LA music scene. Too bad the series itself quickly descends from bruising rock aria to sappy emo-ballad.

There’s enough musical archeology to all of this, the LA “Sunset Strip” scene with The Troubadour, recording studios and the like, the band’s first “stick together” vows after we’ve heard them stumble through “House of the Rising Sun,” to keep some folks interested.

The music – and there is a whole album's worth of original songs – is fun if lacking depth, like everything else in the series. Try as it might, "Daisy" can't create an evocative story out of nostalgia, electric guitars and pretty people.

For all the series’ delights — the chemistry between Sam Claflin and Riley Keough, the constant scene-stealing by Camila Morrone, the fizziness of the original songs — there’s an unignorable smallness throughout, a sense that, as with that Fleetwood Mac T-shirt, we’re settling for a copy of a copy.

The series falls into a number of expected traps. It’s the “same old tired rock and roll tale,” as Billy puts it, and he’s not wrong. But the episodes have a cumulative power, even if the storytelling often feels like it’s cutting corners rather than digging in.

Sure, it’s serviceable as a decent binge for people who get off on reading about how much Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham hated each other, but at no point does it even come close to the heights reached by the original novel, ones that went past the simple shock value of overdoses and infidelity and whatever else the writers of the show could scrounge up.

Daisy Jones & The Six is so tepid and deliberately inoffensive it almost becomes the opposite. To even dimly invoke the legacy of Fleetwood Mac in service of something so wan and lifeless—stuck in a no man’s land between melodrama soap and wistful epic drama—is almost a vulgarity. Though, that’s probably too strong a word to describe a series that is, essentially, the TV equivalent of muzak.

"Daisy" will find an audience, though its lazy reliance on '70s counter-cultural clichés and apocryphal stories grows tiresome.

It’s disappointing that “Daisy Jones” mostly falls back on rock ‘n’ roll clichés and shameless melodrama.